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Hi Captain,
I’ve (she/her) known ‘Hannah’ (she/her) for about 11 years after becoming friends through a once-popular blogging site. We’ve only met irl once, but used to message each other regularly and send each other gifts to celebrate holidays/life events. Hannah was always kind and supportive in the first few years of our friendship. She then started with an irregular (but often enough) pattern of condescending comments.
One of the worst examples was when a coworker body shamed me over one of my biggest insecurities. Hannah acted like I was being ridiculous for being upset about this (as a side note, things eventually got so bad with the coworker that I quit that job without having another one to go to). I never stood up to Hannah at these points out of fear of losing the friendship. But when I look back, I wish I’d ended it years ago.
Anyway, I went back to university 2 years ago, after dropping out when I was younger due to health issues. This is where Hannah’s past behaviours have gotten worse and become more regular. She’s downplayed my achievements. She’s repeatedly given me unsolicited (and usually incorrect) advice, based on the assumption that she knows more about my university’s regulations than I do because she did a completely different degree at another university several years ago. And any time I’ve been struggling and tried turning to her for emotional support, she’s been judgmental and disparaging. When I missed a few weeks of classes at the end of my first semester due to a period of burnout, she acted as if I’m a lazy teenager who was just skipping class because I couldn’t be bothered to go.
The breaking point for me was back in February this year, when I had a group project where the grade would count towards 50% of one of my modules, and everyone in the group would get the same grade for the project. As I feared after two years of working hard to get good grades, I got put in a group with someone who had the writing skills of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Even though I said twice when venting to Hannah that we all got the same final grade, her reply was “Do you get marked as a group? Sometimes they’re marked individually so you might be ok.” Because clearly I don’t have the intelligence or sense to know how my own modules are assessed… She didn’t respond when I told her (again) that the project wasn’t graded on an individual basis, and we’d be graded as a group.
Since then, I’ve been doing a slow fade. The only contact I’ve had from Hannah since February has been a message on my birthday. I didn’t really want to potentially have a Big Friendship Breakup on my birthday, so I just replied a couple of days later saying thank you. At this point, I’m tempted to just remove Hannah from my social media followers, delete our old messages and be done with it because it seems like the slow fade’s done its job. But at the same time, I feel like I could be wrong about this. And that if she contacts me again, then I should probably tell her that I want to end the friendship (and explain why) after knowing her for such a long time. What would you do in this situation?
Thank you,
I Am Untethered but My Rage Knows Some Bounds
Hi Captain,
Sorry to email you again so soon after my first message. I’d tried to keep my last letter as short as I can, but thinking about it I realise it probably wasn’t clear what I’ve been doing to slow fade Hannah rather than it being the other way around.
Since her reply to the group project rant, I’ve stopped initiating any conversations with Hannah. After a couple of months of no contact, I unfollowed her on social media. I also set restrictions so that she couldn’t view my Stories posts, and any comments she made on my grid posts would have to be approved by me before anyone else could see them. This was partly because a couple of months before I decided on the slow fade, she sent me an unnecessarily rude Story reply about a tattoo I’d gotten.
As I mentioned in my first email, Hannah didn’t contact me again either between February and my birthday and the feeling of relief was unreal. I thought the slow fade had already worked until she’d wished me a happy birthday. Neither of us have contacted each other again since then – this has included me not messaging her on either her birthday, or her son’s first birthday. Part of why I’m unsure about why the slow fade has actually worked is because I realise that caring for a now 1 year old child is going to take up a lot of Hannah’s time and energy, and that might have at least something to do with the reduced contact from her.
I hope this makes things a bit clearer and I’m sorry again for sending another long email!
All the best,
I Am Untethered but My Rage Knows Some Bounds
Dear Untethered,
How you can tell when a slow fade has worked depends vastly on what you mean by “worked.”
It seems like what you want is for Hannah to figure out that you no longer want her in your life (even at an annual birthday greeting distance) without you having to give her that message explicitly. But you also wonder if you are supposed to tell her that the friendship is over and why. You are correct to sense that these are competing impulses. Do you want Hannah to continue drifting away and leave you alone, or do you want Hannah to learn some lesson about how much she hurt you… and then leave you alone? In other words, do you want to be free, or do you want the last word?
People that we used to be close to don’t conveniently disappear from the earth once we’ve outgrown them. And once we leave them behind, we don’t get a say in how they feel about us or the stories they tell about our time together. The transition can be painful, but it can also be freeing to realize that we also get to tell any story we want.
A very wise friend once said that the way that he knew he was truly over a breakup was when he could tell a short, simple story about that person and their time together without rehashing all the old grievances and feelings and without it hijacking or ruining his whole day. For instance, if he ran into a mutual acquaintance who hadn’t heard about the breakup, when they politely asked “How’s Ex-Name doing?” he knew he was on his way to healing if he could just say, “Oh, we split up” and leave it at that. “It didn’t work out.” “Eh, we wanted different things.” Even, “Yeah, it was messy for a minute, but we’re both better off.” As opposed to when things were more raw and any mention of their name could trigger a need to spill the whole long, sordid tale.
Hannah, busy with a toddler, does not seem to be thinking about you all that much. She’s not actively trying to reconnect or seek support from you, you only ever met up in person the one time in 11 years, you no longer exchange gifts, and either she hasn’t noticed your careful social media retreat at all or she has and doesn’t care. If she were actively communicating with you, then an explicit conversation ending the friendship might be kinder, but since she’s not, what’s the point of engaging more deeply? You can’t control whether she ever messages you again, but you can control how you respond or whether you respond at all. If she does go out of her way to say something mean, you always have the option of saying, “Wow, what a shitty thing to say.” You said that you always feared standing up to her would end the friendship, might as well find out!
With that in mind, I think the slow fade will have “worked” when it works on you. When you stop carefully managing your social media settings, when you give yourself permission to just delete her number, when a random birthday message from an old acquaintance thanks to a platform that makes a point of reminding everyone you’ve ever met when your birthday is becomes background noise and you feel no obligation to either reply or explain why you didn’t. When the story you tell yourself about her is “A long time ago, we used to be friends/but I haven’t thought of you lately at all…” then you’ll be free. You don’t need her participation for any of that. It’s time to leave the list of Hannah-grievances here with me and The Internet, and get in touch with the people in your life who you trust to be supportive and kind and who don’t make you afraid to stand up to them. .
Note: If you go to YouTube, the very first comment says “The perfect song for purging your Facebook list.” It’s not just me!
Dear Captain Awkward,
CW: Abuse, loneliness on holidays. Some starter context: Me (they/them) and my friend (we’ll call them Oz) (they/them) have been friends for about a decade, and moved in together during the pandemic. We were already very close emotionally, and spending loads of time together and noticing all the ways that our approaches to communication made each other feel good eventually led to us identifying as Queer Platonic Life Partners (QPLPs)—that is to say, we had 0 desire for romance or sex in our relationship, but we loved each other dearly and wanted to entwine our lives in many other ways, including but not limited to:
- -being each others’ emergency contacts
- -meal planning together every week
- -going on platonic dates and surprising each other with heartfelt gestures
- -future planning, talking about living in a community with our romantic partners where we still lived in the same house or duplex or similar
- -advising and materially supporting each other during crises
- -caretaking when either of us was in an episode of incapacity due to physical injury or mental illness
- -making holiday traditions together, consulting with each other about where we would spend the holidays and how to have meaningful time with our other partners while still having time together
It wasn’t perfect, and to be transparent I was going through a fuckload of personal and career struggles through a chunk of those years, during which they helped me work through a traumatic tendency to avoid leaning on other people. At a certain point though, they were still encouraging me to do this, while it became increasingly clear to me that they were burning themselves out between the care they were offering me and the EXTREMELY full social plate they had outside me.
They also started a new romantic relationship about a year and a half back that they have recently disclosed was emotionally abusive and isolating. While they were in that relationship, they steeply increased their tendency to overcommit, and it became a source of conflict that they would promise to handle a chore or make time for me on a certain day, and then they would flake or genuinely forget (burnout tends to include memory gaps for them). While I spoke up about it several times, I struggled to lean into that conflict because I felt guilty about how much care they had offered me during the pandemic, and because I also thought they were having New Relationship Energy and I kind of…wanted them to get to focus on that relationship being exciting for a bit, with the belief that once the relationship was less new they would either find more balance or we could talk about what we wanted out of our dynamic now that there was a new person. I’ve since learned that the distancing I felt from them was at least in part due to the abusive partner not letting them invite their other friends and loved ones to things, and acting controlling about how they would act with other people at events they attended together.
Oz remained in a crisis space for unrelated reasons while a lot of this was happening, and it culminated this past summer when we had to find separate places to live while waiting for a new lease at a cheaper place to come into effect (we had a 3 month gap, and Oz was unemployed, and I was deep in career burnout requiring medical help and rest—they moved in with out of town friends who let them crash on the couch, I found a summer sublet that let me stay near my job).
The move out was a struggle. I was consistently overextended and putting out fires at work, they were doing the same in their relationship (I can confirm now but at the time it would sound like me: “I’m anxious, we need a plan for this logistical problem asap” them: “It’s going to be ok buddy! We have lots of time.” Me: “It feels that way, but functionally I only have _____ time because (conflicting non-droppable situations). Can we work on it together next weekend?” Them: “I gotta go to (fun hobby), but I can handle it during the week!”
I now understand in context why it was so important to them to have like, little spaces where they could just enjoy something uncomplicated. But at the time I was just trying to boundary set based on what I knew, and so when they called me one day after my stated “last possible day I could help with the move”, I felt frustrated and tried to do a “I hear that it’s overwhelming, but I’ve BEEN saying this was gonna be hard if we left it and I can’t help at this point” and they felt really hurt and abandoned because they wanted emotional reassurance and instead heard that it was their fault.
In a recent convo, they named that this interaction deeply damaged trust for them. They also broke up with abusive partner a month ago. They also named that they’re not sure if they see us as life partners anymore (I asked), and named that they are in a dangerous mental health space and don’t really have capacity to figure that out. They want to have some normalizing, low pressure time together.
I want to give them that. I also feel like….there was kind of a secondary trauma for me that came from the choices they made in our dynamic as a product of the abusive one? And my efforts to center their hurt about the move out means that we still haven’t meaningfully talked about this like, 6 month period where I felt like a battery giving everything I could to keep us logistically afloat as a couple while it felt like they then used all of their overextending energy to try and appease abusive partner, generally at the expense of things like our move, our dates, my birthday party.
I proposed seeking a family or couple’s therapist in 4-6 months so we could process stuff while like….keeping them safe? Because while I want to resolve this stuff I haven’t had space to voice, they just need to kind of heal and take care of themselves right now, and that conversation feels hard and nuanced in a way where I want someone present to help hold space and step in where it’s needed. Oz seemed really surprised by this, said that couple’s therapy feels like a thing for people whose relationship is on the rocks, but they don’t feel like our relationship is bad right now.
Which is baffling, because it FEELS AWFUL TO ME RIGHT NOW. They are healing from abuse. I am still juggling life crises that impact how I am able to show up at home and with loved ones. They don’t know if they see us as life partners, we don’t go to things with each others’ friends “as a couple,” and every time I’ve tried to talk about the holidays this year they’ve panicked and dodged, saying once or twice that they might just need to be alone.
Today is Thanksgiving, and I learned just now that they and our two other roommates (mutual friends) all planned to go to the roommates’ family Thanksgiving together without mentioning it to me. I am spending the holiday alone (family is complicated, I set a boundary this year, my other romantic partners have their own things going on and we haven’t generally spent Thanksgiving together in the past). Oz noticed something was wrong this morning and came into my room to comfort me about how family is hard, and it didn’t seem to occur to them at all that I was sad because I didn’t get to spend time with **them specifically.**
I feel like I’ve been shifted to a different category of friendship, in a way that, if it were a romantic relationship, I would’ve called a break up and requested at least 3 months of space for a “clean break.” I live with them, so that’s obviously not extremely feasible. I don’t know what they want out of our dynamic, and in our last convo they didn’t seem to either, and they don’t have capacity to talk about it while their recent romantic breakup is so raw, and they still wanna do loving friendship tho while not talking super explicitly about what our relationship should be **right now** while we figure it out?
Like maybe they don’t want therapy b/c they want to shift our relationship to a different category of effort that doesn’t involve spending money on a therapist.
But that….**IS** a break up to me. And while I know that if they still don’t have an answer after a certain amount of time (maybe end of year?) I’ll need to walk, I don’t know what to do…right now, that is accessible to them, but still allows me a sense of clarity and healthy boundaries. I’m feeling really overwhelmed with this, and would love a perspective on how I can either frame conversation with them, or how I can find clarity without them, while living with them and seeing them every day, and set those boundaries kindly knowing that they’ve been isolating themselves in a toxic sitch for a while and deserve to be treated better regardless of how close our dynamic stays after this. Like…I want them to have the space they haven’t been getting to get back in touch with their needs, and I want them to feel safe to express to the degree they can, and I don’t know what to offer or not while grieving a relationship that they seem to have redefined without me.
Sincerely,
Alone on Thanksgiving
Dear Alone on Thanksgiving,
Your question reminds me of two past “greatest hits” questions:
1) Counter-Intuitive Friendship-Fixing Advice (The Be Nice To Yourself Project)
2) He Broke Up With Me But Hasn’t Moved Out Yet. How Do I Not Ruin Our Last Chance To Make This Work?
Common themes: Sharing living quarters, wanting desperately to talk things over and come to a resolution with someone who would rather do anything but that, and situations where the best advice I can give is to stop working on the relationship harder and better and channel all of that effort into taking the very best care of yourself.
I don’t know what the long-term future looks like for you and Oz, but here’s what I can observe in the short-term: This person is not acting like someone who sees you as Their Person. If they are, then they suck at being Your Person. However you thought this was going to go when you made all those beautiful plans during Peak Lockdown, it’s not working, and it’s time to adapt accordingly.
Every single thing you say about Oz is about how they want and need space specifically from you. They don’t want to go to couple’s therapy. They don’t want to make shared holiday plans. On Thanksgiving, they didn’t come see if you were okay, they came to “confront” you about being upset that you weren’t invited to a thing that literally everyone else in your house planned in advance to go to and leave you behind. Even if the guest lists were set and the plans were made, did anyone even bring you a plate? They didn’t want to show up and help with a joint move out of a shared living space, which reads to me like even when something that would take stress off of you is in their own interest they cannot muster bandwidth for it. They get mad at you and make you feel guilty every time you express a need in their direction.
Abuse sucks and leaves a crater of destruction behind even when the abuser departs. Oz has clearly been through a lot this year and maybe they’re doing the best they can to take care of themselves in a bad situation. Unfortunately, it’s left them in a place where they have little or nothing to offer you, a person who has also been through the wars. If I had to guess, they’ve reconsidered the QPLP status of your relationship but feel guilty and don’t know quite how to break the news, so they’re hoping that if they are sufficiently avoidant you’ll handle it for them the way you handle everything else (like moving house). It may not all that conscious or articulated, something doesn’t have to be On Purpose in order to be not enough for you.I’m familiar with all sides of the common “I feel so guilty about letting someone down that I’ve started to resent them on top of avoiding them” cycle, including the inside. It’s not pretty, but it is human.
But also, they are communicating: They are mentally and emotionally overwhelmed, no longer sure about any of the prior long-term plans you made, and only up for low-pressure, low-key interactions. They don’t want to go to couple’s therapy for something they don’t see as a couple (if they ever did). They want to like, watch TV together. Sometimes. With someone who is safe and restful and who places no demands on them. You could spend years trying to nail down the exact proportion of “can’t” vs. “don’t want to” vs. “who is to blame” here, or you could take them at their word and re-direct your efforts into taking care of you in the absence of anyone else volunteering to do so.
Let me quote you back to yourself:
- “…it FEELS AWFUL TO ME RIGHT NOW.”
- “They don’t know if they see us as life partners, we don’t go to things with each others’ friends “as a couple,” and every time I’ve tried to talk about the holidays this year they’ve panicked and dodged, saying once or twice that they might just need to be alone.”
- Free space for every time you wonder if you’re allowed to be upset or need anything given what they’ve been through (Don’t use this as a drinking game, kids, you will end up in the emergency room).
- “I feel like I’ve been shifted to a different category of friendship, in a way that, if it were a romantic relationship, I would’ve called a break up and requested at least 3 months of space for a “clean break.”
- “But that….**IS** a break up to me.”
Yes.
It’s a slow-motion breakup complicated by recent trauma and forced proximity, but a relationship that makes you feel awful is not a relationship that is working for you in its current form. At minimum, it’s time to stop prioritizing and planning around people who are not making similar plans around you. You need a new plan.
First plan: Make other holiday plans.
Big font, so you know I’m serious. What other winter holidays do you celebrate? Based on how Thanksgiving went down, assume that you are not celebrating with anyone who currently lives in your house. You’ve got one day ’til Hanukkah starts, 15 days until Solstice, 19 until Christmas, and 26 until New Year’s Eve.
To be completely clear, that does not mean “check in one last time with Oz and other housemates about their plans and then wait and see what they say.” Today, right now, make your own plans that do not revolve around or require any input or participation from them. If they subsequently initiate plans with you, then you can decide to change your mind, do both, etc. Ideally you can do something with other people in your support network, preferably people who find you delightful and who would be overjoyed to have a little more of you to go around this holiday season. But do not wait to put something in place for yourself, even if that means going somewhere warm for a few days alone. If you haven’t already bought gifts them, don’t, and don’t assume they’ve gotten anything for you. If it turns out they have, you can be pleasantly surprised for a change instead of predictably disappointed.
Second plan: Make other therapy plans. Couple’s counseling is off the table, but do you have a you-therapist? If not, find one. If yes, put some appointments on your calendar. You need at least one safe space where “taking care of Oz” and “tiptoeing around what Oz wants” is not a requirement before you get to need things.
Third plan: Make other housing plans. Living with Oz is not working out as you hoped and is clearly making some aspects of your life actively worse. If you had three months to find a different living situation that worked better for you, where would you go? Start making lists.
How would you quietly handle the logistics of putting together enough money, moving your stuff, and getting settled–importantly–without input, help, or further discussion with Oz about your plans until they constitute a decision (“I’m moving out as of _______, so if you want to find someone to take over my room you should start looking”) vs. an ultimatum (“If things don’t change I’ll have to maybe consider possible (but not really) moving out mumble mumble.”)
Do you spot the difference? One you’re doing at them, the other you’re doing for you. Ultimatums aren’t inherently bad, sometimes they are necessary, but they are still a last ditch attempt to influence the other person to give you what you want or maybe learn some kind of lesson. Then there’s the part where you have to be willing to follow through, or else they become meaningless. Whereas, “I’ve decided that this is what’s best for me” is a way of de-centering the other person and focusing on yourself. In a perfect world, you’d want to operate completely in the open and give everyone as much notice as possible. But Oz doesn’t want to have deep discussions about the future of your relationship. By avoiding ultimatums, you can respect their wishes and take care of yourself at the same time.
Three months is an arbitrary number. Maybe it will take you one, or six, to put the necessary pieces together. But I think it’s important to remind yourself that you have choices about where you live and at least put a date on a calendar for yourself to say, “One way or another, this will all be different soon.” That can only be good for you. It might take a long time for it to feel good, but this is where the change starts. The part of your life that has been waiting for Oz to be different so that you can be happy will stop waiting, and other choices will come into focus.
I said I couldn’t predict the future, but here’s what tends to happen in stories like yours and the ones I linked above. In the short term, while you’re still sharing living space and no permanent decisions have been announced, once you stop chasing the other person trying to fix everything and focus on taking care of yourself, thing often get noticeably better once everyone has a little breathing room. Nobody’s chasing, nobody’s running, the person who wanted space has it now, so it instantly feels more relaxed than it did.
Incidentally, this is what’s behind the huge rise in stories (on TikTok, Reddit, etc.) about cishet men who feel completely blindsided by divorce. Their wives stopped “nagging” them so they thought the problems were over when in fact, their wives just gave up trying, went about their business quietly (by far the safest way to leave a bad relationship), and felt so fucking relieved as a result that they acquired a noticeable glow. The dudes were only blindsided because that the other 17,000 times the wives asked for equal consideration, respect, effort, and household labor didn’t register. “Oh hey, remember when your wife made Thanksgiving dinner for you and your whole family with no help from you, but then had to work a shift in the ER, and when she came home all the food was gone and nobody made her a plate even though the guests took home leftovers? Yeah, can’t imagine why she’s gone, buddy. Tough break.” I feel like I read that story about 100 times every year.
That feeling of temporary relief is great, when it comes! But it doesn’t mean that the quiet-quitting person started getting their needs met within the relationship all of a sudden. They made steps to get their needs met elsewhere, and to the more avoidant person’s perception, they just stopped having so many inconvenient ones.
Long-term, in the best case scenario, that relief lasts after you are out of that house and becomes everyone’s best shot at rebuilding a functional friendship someday. You were incompatible at this one specific kind of relationship but other shapes are possible, and the story becomes “We tried this thing, we both went through a terrible time, it ended up not working, but here we are. We should never be roommates again, but all the fun, loving, kind, caring stuff that connected us through a terrible time is still here.”
Long-term, one very realistic scenario is that the further you get from Oz, the more you get in touch with your own needs, and the more you surround yourself with people who do have the bandwidth and desire to reciprocate the amount of care and consideration you show in relationships, the angrier you’ll get at how little you were willing to settle for.
Red flag alert: When the time comes, I want you to pay close attention to whether removing pressure and giving Oz space after they clearly asked for space makes everything worse…for you. Do they sabotage your escape efforts? Do they refuse joint counseling but expect that you’ll serve as an on-call individual free therapist for dealing with their emotions while keeping yours under wraps? Does leaving a co-housing situation where nobody could bother to invite you to Thanksgiving constitute “abandonment”…of them… that you’re supposed to apologize for? Anything that rings the toxic “How dare you leave me before I leave you” bell is not a sign that you’re leaving wrong or wrong to leave. It’s a sign that this was always going to end up here. I sincerely hope that’s nowhere near the case, but you are so used to putting their needs before your own that I want to at least point out the emergency exits and remind you that the closest one may be behind you.
Hi Captain Awkward,
I’m a longtime reader of your blog and I’ve learned a lot from the advice you give. My family life is complex and generally, I’m able to use the tools I learned in therapy (I do not have a current therapist) to handle day-to-day issues that crop up, but I’ve run into something confusing enough that I would love to hear your thoughts.
Context: My mother has stage 4 lung cancer diagnosed during the pandemic. She is a stay-at-home Catholic mother with strong opinions who home-schooled me and my siblings. My dad loves my mom very much and will never ever push back on her ever. I went to college, grew as a person through both good and bad experiences, and built a wonderful & stable life for myself. My mother and I have a rocky relationship with periods of good relationship interrupted by long stretches of bad relationship. I call most week days to talk with her and sometimes the calls are fun and great and sometimes the calls are awful fights. Her cancer diagnosis has only made things more fraught. I admittedly do keep her at arm’s length because of boundary overstepping in the last four years, but we’ve kept daily-ish phone calls in an attempt to repair the relationship. I want the relationship to work and be positive.
She’s always put a huge emphasis on holidays and special days. Heaven help us if we forget Mother’s Day. She had a reallllllllly hard time when I started dating folks and wanted to spend time with them with their families. For the past decade, I’ve been putting up with celebrating my birthday twice: one at my parents’ house and one doing what I actually want to do sometimes with friends and sometimes alone. Mom makes a birthday banner (it’s tradition) and makes a meal she only makes for birthdays. It’s very kind of her. It’s also non-negotiable. She drove up to see me last year on my birthday because I couldn’t drive down for a variety of reasons.
This year, I don’t have bandwidth or time to drive down to my parents’ house for a birthday celebration. My brother kindly arranged tickets for me to see a show I’ve wanted to see and so I’m celebrating a little early with him and our respective significant others. I figured, my birthday is only a week before Thanksgiving and I’m going down to see the folks then anyway, we can just bundle birthday in with Thanksgiving. I can be extra grateful for family this year lol.
Captain, when my mom asked what day I was celebrate my birthday with her, and I proposed Thanksgiving, she went apoplectic. So I kicked the can down the road (first mistake probably) and said I’d figure something else out. Well it turns out a calendar is kinda tough to rearrange sometimes and this week I officially told her that I’d love to celebrate as part of Thanksgiving. Her response was a long upset rant about how I’ve entirely missed the point of my birthday, she needs me home to celebrate my birthday because it’s a celebration of her mothering, with a little bit of “Christmas is about Mary not Jesus” sprinkled in for good measure. I attempted to smooth things over without giving in (yay! I held strong!) and she ended up accusing me of “using my words to get my way,” telling me she loves me and then hanging up. She never hangs up first.
I guess since I’ve never missed a birthday with her, I had missed out on hearing her viewpoint, but even given her other wild opinions, this felt like it’s out there. A day later she texted me telling me she needs space and time to think and that we shouldn’t have our daily evening phone call until maybe the day before Thanksgiving. And that she loves me very much and is looking forward to Thanksgiving. Lots of kissy emojis. I don’t love the vibes and I get an icky feeling reading the text.
I…don’t know what to do. Do I cancel plans I already have and offer her one of my weekends? Do I just wait and show up to Thanksgiving and hope she’s reasonable? Historically my family won’t intercede, so asking my father or brother to run interference won’t work. One of my friends suggested I send her flowers on my birthday and I’m actually considering it.
I’m 28, my pronouns are she/her.
Thanks,
GGB
Dear GGB,
I had a major deadline right around the time this came in, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to it in time to help with the immediate problem of birthday and holiday plans. I hope you enjoyed celebrating your birthday with your brother as planned and had an okay visit with your family. Sending flowers would have been a lovely gesture, but you’re not a terrible person if you didn’t.
I want to answer it now because it highlights something important about the process of learning to set boundaries with difficult family members, namely that it rarely feels good in the moment even if it goes about as well as can be expected. ‘Tis the season for family togetherness and the re-opening of every fault line, so maybe your story can help others in the same situation.
It’s okay that you wanted to do something different for your birthday this year. Even if you enjoyed these obligatory parties, it’s okay to not want to make the same journey twice in the same week. “Ordinarily I’d love to, but it’s going to have to wait until I see you at Thanksgiving this year. Miss you, love you, bye!”
It’s also okay that your mom was disappointed. It’s clearly important to her to be celebrated celebrate with you on the actual day. She’s also trying to manage her time, effort, and social battery during a busy season, and she’s not a terrible person for thinking about how many more of these she gets to do. I don’t say that to throw more guilt-logs on your already flaming pyre, it’s just part of the whole picture, the same way you getting freaked out at your mom being suddenly affectionate and effusive instead of punishing indicates that either a) you don’t have a lot of experience receiving affectionate words from her or b) you have enough experience to associate “Mom being nice to me” with “definitely a trap.”
Let’s step back and look at what happened: You told your mom about your birthday plans, she blew up at you, then asked for space so that she could regroup, and then she sent you the Texts of Many Emojis to reassure you that the fight was over and that she was looking forward to seeing you. This is theoretically how functional adults are supposed to handle conflict? Your mom could tell she was getting heated and possibly on the verge of saying something she might regret, so she took a break and then came back to reassure you when she was in a better place to do that. You’ve taken breaks from interacting with her in the past when you needed, and you still came back. Could that be what’s happening here? So long as you and your brother got to hang out as planned, and you did celebrate your life-giver with the banner and the special meal last weekend, and everyone is still mostly speaking to everyone else, you won.
It didn’t feel like winning, for reasons we’ll get into. But like…you did it. You won. You told your mom news that you knew was likely to disappoint her and the world is still turning. You broke a ten year streak of doing something you don’t enjoy. The sun rose and set on schedule. You did it.
What I need to tell you is that sometimes this is as good as it gets.
There are reasons that that your mom’s quick change from “apoplectic” to saccharine made you feel icky and that any plans you made after the initial refusal to meet up on your birthday felt like a trap. Anybody who didn’t grow up in your family is missing that context, and anybody who grew up in a similar family flinched and wondered just how soon into Thanksgiving the needle on this guilt trip would drop. You don’t trust your mom to just express affection and excitement without a secret punishment lurking somewhere in the mix. You may be wrong and you may be right about this particular instance, but that mistrust didn’t form in a vacuum.
When a fraught childhood relationship with a caregiver becomes something else as an adult, there can be an enormous feeling of anticlimax and disorientation even if the result is not total estrangement. This person who once had all this power over you just…doesn’t…anymore. They can’t compel you to spend time with them anymore, so they have to use other tactics. Some learn that you will eventually stop showing up to places where you get yelled at and make an effort to be pleasant. Some go with obligation and guilt because that’s what’s always worked before. Some go with massively pretending that everything is okay as long as nobody is honest about what the relationship is actually like. Some rapid-cycle between all of these and induce emotional whiplash. Will the real parent please stand up? How long will the pleasantness last? Are you ever going to talk about anything real ever again?
From what you describe, you and your mom pretty much have three modes: 1) Fight, which you do all the time in the course of your daily phone calls and texts, and which I’m going to guess happens most often when some detail of your true personality, tastes, beliefs, and lifestyle choices that conflict with the strict way you were raised slips out. 2) Flight, which you did to make a happy life away from her. 3) Interludes of Studiously Not Talking About Certain Stuff and Working Very Hard At Being Pleasant so that you can get along during the time she has left. There is no fourth mode where it’s comfortable, relaxed, and safe to let your guard down. With all the love in the world if you don’t have the sense of safety, trust, or even shared reality to fall back on then it’s impossible to build an authentic relationship.
Your birthday pinged all three modes at once. For once you stopped faking it around your birthday and prioritized doing a fun thing and managing your own schedule and stress levels instead of doing what she wants. So you fought. Then she fled before you had a chance to. That’s new, at least! I suspect that the skid into Mode 3 when the kissyface texts arrived felt icky because in a functional relationship, before the “everything’s fine!” stage there would be apologies. “Mom, I’m so sorry I hurt your feelings, I know how important birthdays are to you. But I am looking forward to celebrating when we can do it right..” “Daughter, I’m sorry that I blew up at you. I hope you have a great time with your brother and I’ll see you very soon.”
Y’all skipped right over that part because neither of you are sorry. I doubt it’s occurred to her that she might want to apologize for anything, even as a gesture toward repairing your relationship. You feel guilty about upsetting her and angry that once again she made it all about herself, but you’re not sorry to miss yet another forced celebration. Of course any reconciliation feels fake and fragile.
I’ve known people where any and all pleasant overtures are definitely a trap, so if you tell me that’s the case here I believe you. But I’m not sure this is. Either your mom figured out that her initial reaction was over the top and genuinely wanted to reassure you, or she figured out that if she wanted to see you she should bother to fake it enough to reassure you. If everybody managed to have a medium time when you got together and there were no dramatic fights, I’d call it a victory.
And that’s the holiday message I want to send to everyone reading:
1) If your family dynamics suck, but you plan to see them anyway, it is okay to keep expectations low and aim for a medium time where nobody engages all that deeply.
2) Setting and enforcing boundaries to take care of yourself isn’t mean, but that doesn’t mean it’s fun. Sometimes people are going to react badly, or you’re going to feel raw and weird even when it goes mostly fine, and that is just part of life. It doesn’t mean you did it wrong. You’re just used to comparing the discomfort of setting and maintaining the boundary to a fantasy world where you didn’t need to work so hard. What we’re really measuring is the difference between not giving in and feeling weird about it to the discomfort of giving in resentfully and feeling equally-but-differently weird about it. In a situation where there is no pleasing everyone, somebody’s bound to be disappointed. Deciding that you’ll always give in to whatever will avert the other person’s disappointment means accepting that the disappointed party will always be you.
3) The first time you break a pattern is usually the hardest time. Until you ride out the discomfort and hurt feelings and pressure, it feels like a zero-sum game that the relationship may never recover from. If everyone had a consistent sense of comfort, safety and trust within the relationship, it wouldn’t feel like that, but you don’t, so it does. Once you get through the initial conflict with your boundaries intact and everybody can see that just because you did not show up this one time in this one specific way it doesn’t mean that everything is broken forever, hopefully you can establish a new normal where when and how you show up becomes a choice among many possible choices. There’s no way to know until after you’ve broken the pattern.
4) Sometimes this is as good as it gets. Not fixed, not resolved, not healed, not comfortable, but a little better than it was. Not so much “fake it til you make it” but the slow process of showing up as best you can, meeting the other person where they are, giving them lots of chances to pleasantly surprise you, and creating one good/neutral interaction at a time to push the bad ones down and see what else is possible. That’s not something you ever owe anyone who mistreats you, but it can be a gift you choose to give when someone is worth keeping in your life even when they make you play on hard mode.
My lovely Letter Writer, the thing where you check in with daily calls even though you fight sometimes? And you still visit, even though your adult life is a story about how you are happier the further you get from home? You are doing the work, and you’re probably more able to stay connected and loving because you created enough distance for yourself to thrive. I’m so sorry that you and your mom won’t get a lifetime to see what else could be possible together, but maybe the time you had a fight about your birthday, she decided to stop having the fight, and things were a little awkward between you is a step in the right direction.
May all of your winter holidays be at least Medium-Okay.
What keeps us attracted to our spouse as we age? A quick internet search on this left our heads spinning. So here’s our summary based on working with hundreds of couples…
1. INTERDEPENDENCE: Finding opportunities to lean on each other for different needs in life. Celebrating each others differences and then leaning on them
The opposite: Codependents that suck the life out of you and Independents that are more like roommates.
2. TRUST: Love is NOT the most important thing, but rather having someone you can rely on when you need them most. Are they engaged in doing life with you? Trust guides us in who we can love.
The opposite: The emotionally lazy spouse that avoids conflict, blames others, and is not accountable to their actions.
3. PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and when we see our partners taking care of their health, prioritizing hygiene and taking care of themselves because they want to look good for us, that’s very attractive. It shows they care how they look for us.
The opposite: The spouse that doesn’t care about their looks and becomes a slob.
4. CONFIDENCE: Confidence is about trusting yourself. In order to do that, you must become self aware of your strengths and your weaknesses. These partners know who they are, their inherent worth, and find happiness within themselves and share that with others around them.
The opposite: The insecure spouse that is constantly belittling themselves, doubting their abilities, and is constantly comparing themselves to others.
What area do you need to spend time focusing on in your marriage to make yourself more attractive to your spouse?
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Written by Meygan Caston
Meygan Caston is the co-founder of Marriage365 and lives in Orange County, California with her husband Casey and their two children. She loves the beach, dance parties, writing, spa days, and helping couples connect in their marriage. Her life-long dream is to walk the Camino, have lunch with Brené Brown, and get on The Price is Right.
The post 4 Ways to Maintain Attraction in Marriage As We Age appeared first on Marriage365®.
Source: https://marriage365.com/blog/4-ways-to-maintain-attraction-in-marriage-as-we-age/
